Beautiful Liars_a gripping thriller about friendship, dark secrets and bitter betrayal

by Isabel Ashdown

  I hefted the rusty anchor across the verge and heaved it on to the girl’s chest, all the while praying that no one would pass by at that moment, that we would have time to complete our work unseen. I am grateful to say my prayers were answered, and we were able to continue unhindered, undisturbed by either pedestrian or waterside dweller. With some effort, I used the bungee cords to bind the anchor to the girl’s chest and after several back-breaking rolls, she was neatly wrapped in the tarpaulin. Katherine appeared stuck to the spot, until I thrust the rope length into her hands and told her to secure the package, using one of those clever knots she was so keen on. ‘It must be a tight one,’ I told her, hurrying her along, keeping my voice low so as not to alert the boat’s inhabitant. ‘Tightly, Katherine! It mustn’t come off!’ She did as she was told, securing the top end of the tarpaulin like a Christmas cracker, winding the rope around the body until she reached the end and tied it in a final knot. The sounds of weekend drinkers sailed in from the streets beyond the canal, and with what I can only describe as inhuman strength, we managed to manoeuvre the body up to the edge of the mooring and down through the gap between the canal wall and the boat. It plummeted like a stone, sinking to the deepest part of the canal, leaving nothing more than an undulating ripple on the water’s surface.

  A group of pedestrians appeared on the path in the distance, and I knew we had missed our chance to dispose of the bicycle. I could only hope that some miscreant would spot it lying there and thieve it away before morning light; one of David’s lost causes, perhaps. Slipping through a break in the hedge, Katherine and I returned home, and I believed the subject would never be raised again. So when David didn’t come home at teatime the following night, after those police officers had called in the morning, I went to confront him at the school where he was preparing the foundations for the new gardens. I won’t dwell on it, but I knew then that he knew – Katherine had told him what had happened – and he could barely look me in the eye.

  ‘Not again,’ he’d said, over and over. ‘Once, and I could accept it was a mistake – but twice?’

  The strange thing is, he just carried on moving rubble with his gloved hands, the builder’s festoon lantern throwing long shadows across the grey expanse. He was weeping, I saw, and it was more than I could bear to see this grown man reduced to such depths. I felt so betrayed by Katherine, and so disgusted by David’s pathetic refusal to even look at me, so I said, ‘For God’s sake, David! It was an accident!’

  Something in him hardened then; I saw it. He hesitated in his labour, his gaze fixed on the ground, the muscles in his jaw tensing.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving. Me and Katherine. We’ll go to my brother’s place for a few weeks, give you some space.’ Now, he looked up at me, his face anguished as he used my real name, the pet name we’d agreed he could only use in private. ‘Please, Hattie, while we’re away, do the right thing this time? Think of her parents, her friends. Go to the police. Because if you don’t, in the next couple of days, then I will.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, and when I saw the love he had for me leave his eyes, I seized the metal spade and I smacked him hard enough that he fell and hit the concrete blockwork with the side of his head. The noise was awful, and I knew in an instant that he was dead. It took me the best part of two hours to remove enough hardcore from that corner to bury him from view, along with the bloodied spade and concrete block. I turned off the lights when I was finished, and hurried back to Katherine.

  At home, I was shocked to find his travel bag already packed and stowed beneath our bed, his passport and Katherine’s documents neatly paperclipped in a brown envelope, along with enough clothes to last them a week or two. After some persuasion, Katherine confessed all, and without prompting she handed over the fifty thousand pounds he had asked her safeguard when he’d seen her at lunchtime. The snakes had had it all worked out! I was wounded, of course, but the money was a blessing, and life, as they say, carried on.

  Oh, David, how I miss you! It saddens me that our life together was cut so short. But even now a small part of me laughs at the naivety in those last words of yours – for it was not two that I killed, my love, but three. Of course, you won’t know about my little brother, but he was the first, way up high on Kinder Scout, though I like to tell myself that that was an accident. But who really knows how a child’s mind works? And arguably that awful mistake with Juliet was not intended, but I’d been led erroneously to believe she was a cuckoo in my nest. Of course, the one that really tested us is the one that no one seems to be troubled by any more, the one you knew about and which I committed with absolute malice aforethought. The murder of your little friend Tilly Jones.

  When we left Castledale that autumn, you had not a clue about my role in Tilly’s death, no idea why I was so adamant about moving on, about changing my name from Hattie to Janet. I told you I wanted a fresh start, that I could never let my parents know we had married, that I had set up home with the man suspected of killing a girl, later that we had a child. Not if I expected to remain in my mother’s favour. As you know, she was worth a lot of money. And you, David, were happy to go along with it, for your ‘beautiful Hattie’. As far as my mother was concerned, after Cambridge I stayed single, a successful career girl living in the City; unmarried, contented to be childless, devoted enough to visit her on an annual basis. You never complained about the arrangement, my love; after all, how would we have survived without my monthly allowance? Especially after that nasty business that led to you losing your teaching post. Someone had to keep the family afloat. But when you came across Tilly’s old necklace in my jewellery box, all those years later, I thought my world had fallen in. We were packing up to come to London, and you asked me what it was, what it meant. I was unprepared. ‘It’s Tilly’s,’ you insisted, and you looked broken. When your eyes met mine, I knew there was no point in denying it. And so instead, I said nothing. I said nothing for the next twelve years, and neither did you.

  Thank goodness the police are such useless buffoons! When they came asking questions about your volunteer Juliet Sherman, I told the officers that I had never met her. When they probed further about our private life, I said you and I had first met in Cambridge and they took my word for it. Perhaps if they’d followed it up they might have discovered my earlier life as Hattie Brown, your teenage sweetheart from the Castledale days. Maybe then they would have joined the dots and worked it all out sooner. Idiots.

  I’ve had a lot of time to think about our life together, David, and I can’t help but feel that if only we’d never had Katherine, things could have turned out so differently. We were in love, weren’t we, way back then, before she came along? She was the undoing of us, the one who led me to deal with Juliet – and with you, my poor love – and ultimately, it was Katherine who exposed the whole sorry mistake. She always was a selfish girl.

  So you see, David, it wasn’t my fault, was it? It really wasn’t my fault.

  Acknowledgements

  Heartfelt thanks go to my readers and champions, and to the wonderful folk involved in making my books as good as they can be. You are diamonds, every one of you x

  Reading Group Guide

  1. The story is told from multiple points of view. Why do you think the author used that technique? How did this shifting structure impact your reading of the novel?

  2. What are your first impressions of Martha? Is she likeable? Do you trust her?

  3. How does the author ratchet up the tension throughout the novel? Were there particular moments when you were on edge?

  4. Katherine’s past has left her damaged. Do your feelings towards Katherine change as the novel goes on? Do you empathise with her?

  5. Describe the relationship between Toby and Martha. What lies in store for them after the novel ends?

  6. Did the revelation about David Crown’s death shock you? Or did you have your suspicions?

  7. What did you think would happen in the showdown on the canal boa
t? Did you think Katherine would be violent towards Martha and Liv?

  8. Describe Katherine’s relationship with her mother. Will they have a happy ending?

  9. Were you surprised at Hattie’s revelation of what happened on the night that Juliet disappeared?

  10. What are your favourite films/tv programmes/books about female friendship?

  Author Q&A with Isabel Ashdown

  Crime writer Stephanie Marland asks Isabel Ashdown about her motivations behind Beautiful Liars

  The voices of your two main narrators Martha and Casey are very distinct. How did you find the experience of writing these very different women?

  I’m fascinated by the differences in people, all those markers that make us individual, that separate us from others – or bind us to them. I spend a lot of time thinking about my characters before I’m ready to write a word of the actual novel – jotting notes and imagining their lives and backgrounds, ‘getting into their heads’, if you like. By the time I start on the real labour of getting the novel down on paper, they feel like real people to me, and more often than not, the voices flow quite naturally.

  Hidden secrets, survivor guilt and loneliness are strong themes within the book, did you start with these in mind or did they develop as you wrote?

  The main theme or idea I started with was that of ‘false identity’. It began after I’d received a Christmas card addressed to a previous resident, and an image flashed into my mind of a lonely woman – a woman with no family and nothing to look forward to, a woman with more than her share of complications. I thought, what if, in another world, she was to reply to that piece of personal correspondence? How might she feel to be someone else, just for a short while? Where might it lead her? How would she feel about being found out? That woman became Casey. As I wrote, the other themes you mention grew quite organically, which is, for me, one of the greatest joys of writing. That sense that the story has taken on a life of its own.

  The conflict between having a well known public image versus the need for privacy and self protection comes out in Martha’s narrative, What was it that especially interested you about this aspect of celebrity culture?

  Martha is a naturally solitary person – that is not to say she is introverted, but rather she has a strong need for time alone, away from the limelight of TV and celebrity. She is conflicted by her public role, thinking of herself as very ordinary, whilst at the same time being fully aware of the privileges celebrity affords her. I think that feeling of inner conflict is something many of us experience in this modern world, our desire for affirmation perhaps at odds with our need for silence and privacy.

  Both your main characters are strongly influenced in adulthood by their experiences as teenagers. Did start with their back stories or did you create the modern versions of themselves and work backwards?

  In real life, our past and present is very much interwoven, with pieces of the past often felt keenly as they fracture through, unsettling our everyday lives. My writing process for Beautiful Liars has been a little like that, in that I used the present narrative as a vehicle to steer the story forward, while every now and then snapshots of the past would show themselves to me, and my character’s paths would grow clearer.

  True crime ‘cold case’ television programmes like the one Martha is making in Beautiful Liars are becoming increasingly popular, what inspired you to write a story set in this world?

  In the early drafting stage, I just had my two main characters: strange Casey, and brittle Martha, both single women in their thirties with an interest in the 18-year-old case of missing schoolgirl Juliet. In the early stages, I like to work closely with my fiction editor, Sam Eades, as I throw around ideas and possible directions, and it was during a conversation with her that we landed on the concept of making Martha the celebrity who would lead the investigation. As soon as I’d established this key role for Martha, I set about researching the world of TV production, and Martha’s supporting crew soon followed. I’m an avid viewer of cold case TV myself, so it was no great hardship having to research the field a little further.

  Is there a chance we’ll see more of Martha in the future?

  I’ve grown rather fond of Martha, and I’d love to write another cold case story for her. I guess the simple answer is, if there’s reader appetite for more Martha, it may well happen!

  My Little Eye by Stephanie Marland is out now

  If you enjoyed Beautiful Liars,

  discover ISABEL ASHDOWN’s

  latest twisty, psychological thriller

  Lake Child

  She thought she knew who she was…

  She didn’t know the half of it…

  Out April 2019

  Am I waking from the dead? Every morning feels like waking from the dead.

  It’s like rising up through emptiness, through a blackness I cannot touch or feel or smell or hear, and only when I open my eyes and see the wooden rafters of my attic room do I remember that I’m alive at all. In the forest we understand the meaning of darkness, where night falls like a black cloak, broken only by the rare slivers of moonshine that slip through the dense canopy of spruce and pine; where the deep lake shadows spiral into endless pools of ebony. But descriptions of the living world beyond my attic window are insufficient to express this waking feeling; this feeling is blacker – blacker, perhaps, than death itself. In the forest, after darkness comes morning light, clean and bright. Here, there is no such illumination; here, sleeping night simply rolls into waking day, where life lingers awhile before sliding back towards sleep again.

  Most mornings I wonder at my very existence, as dreams and half-remembered images tumble across my mind’s eye. I free myself of the wires that tether me to sleep, wincing at the flashing pulses of my bedside unit, alerting my parents downstairs to my waking state. Is this real, or just a nightmare conjured up by my fevered imagination? How can I ever know, sealed up as I am in this wood-panelled room, hidden away at the top of the house, with no one to ask – at least no one who’s prepared to tell me the full truth. My injuries have robbed me of memories – in particular those of recent events, those of the weeks before the accident. I try so hard to piece it together, to dredge up something that makes sense, but there’s nothing to be found. Nothing but an empty hole where that time should live. It’s as if that part of my mind has been wiped clean; my head flipped open and the recent past spirited away. My early recollections, on the other hand, are crystal-clear, as sharp as though they occurred just yesterday, and in these endless hours of solitude I yearn for the freedom and lightness of that sun-filled childhood.

  If I close my eyes I’m back there in an instant.

  I miss the clean, green smell of the pine wood, the cool touch of morning mist on my face, the plip-plopping echoes of fish breaking the water’s surface before rippling back into the deeps of Lake Barn. More than anything, I miss my friends, Lars and Rosa – and someone else, a shadowy presence my fractured mind won’t allow me to grasp. This person-shaped gap haunts me daily as I peer through the slatted window shutters that hold me in, straining to make out the movements of my mother setting off for work in the mist-shrouded clearing below, my father waving her on her way. I ache to rejoin them in a life outside this room, to breathe freely and turn my face to the summer sun. They tell me that it won’t be long now, that I’m almost ready, but that outside there are germs everywhere and I must conserve my energy, concentrate only on getting better. They tell me that I must trust them.

  The trouble is, I don’t trust them. They’re lying – it’s the only thing I’m completely certain of – and it scares me more than the memory loss or the scars that score the length of my body or the deadlocks that seal my door. There are so many questions unanswered. How long have I been shut away in here? When will I get better? Why don’t my friends come to visit? And who is the boy that stands alone at the lakeside, gazing up at the house? It’s too far for me to make out his expression, but his posture is one of sadness. Silently watching
through the loosened slat in my shutters, I grow ever more dependent on his nightly visits, and, while he is a stranger to me, my heart tightens each time I see him standing there, caught in the watery gold reflection of evening’s end. I know better than to ask too many questions of Mum and Dad, or to expect truthful replies, and I’m certain that I can never tell them about the boy, for fear that they might see him as a threat and send him away. For all the questions I do ask, the answers I receive are incomplete, the words designed only to soothe and placate – and my parents’ pained expressions beg me to stop asking, plead with me to settle down and sleep. It won’t be forever, they tell me, soon everything will be back to normal. You’ll see. But then they’re gone again and I feel so completely alone, my body weak and my mind racing, with only myself for company.

  Despite all this, with every passing day my resolve grows quietly stronger: I will recover. I will remember. And, when I do, I will break free.

  About the Author

  Isabel Ashdown was born in London and grew up on the south coast of England. Her writing career was launched with her award-winning debut Glasshopper (Myriad) and she has since written a further five novels. She has a first-class degree in English and an MA in Creative Writing with distinction. Isabel is the current Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Chichester, and with her dachshund Leonard, a weekly reading volunteer for Pets as Therapy. Her latest thriller, Little Sister (Trapeze), was released in 2017 and spent several weeks in the Amazon Bestsellers chart. Isabel lives in West Sussex with her carpenter husband, two teenage children and their dogs.